It shows ingratitude and a lack of imagination to spend the life we’ve been given stamping, literally or metaphorically, on the lives of others, or sneering contemptuously at how they have chosen to make sense of theirs.  It is a harsh world, indescribably cruel.  It is an gentle world, unbelievably beautiful.  It is a world that can make us bitter, hateful, rabid, destroyers of joy.  It is a world that can draw forth tenderness from us, as we lean towards one another over broken gates.  It is a world of monsters and saints, a mutilated world, but it is the only one have been given.  We should let it shock us not into hatred or anxiety, but into unconditional love.

— Richard Holloway, Between the Monster and the Saint